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Business News/ Lounge / Art And Culture/ Airplane Mode by Shahnaz Habib: Why be a traveller, choose to stay home

Airplane Mode by Shahnaz Habib: Why be a traveller, choose to stay home

5 min read 14 Jul 2024, 05:00 PM IST

Shahnaz Habib describes wanderlust as a consumerist idea, and travel an exploitative concept made possible by colonialism

Protests against mass tourism at Barcelona’s Las Ramblas alley, on 6 July.

About 1.3 billion tourists around the world travelled internationally last year—that’s roughly the population of India making their way across the world to take in the sights, experience new cultures and bring home happy memories. This year, summer travel has increased about 40%, business dailies report, alongside headlines about increasing visa rejections and rising airfares. Concurrently, there is news of weary, angry residents in Barcelona spraying tourists with water pistols, Venice introducing an entry fee for day-trippers, and Kyoto limiting tourist access to its historical Gion district. The French tourism minister announced plans to prevent overtourism in landmarks such as the heritage Mont-Saint-Michel monastery in Normandy and the Channel beach in Étretat (suddenly on the tourist map after the Netflix series Lupin was shot there), even as Paris gears up for about 15 million visitors for the Olympics later this month. At home, Tamil Nadu introduced permits for tourists wanting to visit its overburdened, fragile towns in the Western Ghats, in Nilgiris and Kodaikanal. Goans have long demanded curbs on untrammelled tourism which impacts their environment and makes their cities and villages unliveable. Heat waves, traffic jams, litter and water shortages have made Himalayan towns less than idyllic in the summer.

Despite the benefits to the local economy, everywhere there seems a backlash against the heavy toll of overtourism—crowding, the stress on resources and infrastructure, higher rents for locals, and often, unfortunately, a lack of respect for the local culture and ecology. Tourism has become increasingly stressful—whether one travels or one stays home. Reading Shahnaz Habib’s Airplane Mode: A Passive-Aggressive History of Travel in this context is truly an education, making one question more than ever the need to travel regularly, see new places and collect experiences as if they’re fridge magnets.

Habib describes wanderlust as a consumerist idea peddled to us by capitalism, and travel itself as an exploitative concept made possible by colonialism. Colonial explorers, writers and adventurers packaged milking a place for all its worth as the romance of discovery, an idea that has evolved into modern travel and the belief that every place has something to take away. This is Habib’s most compelling argument, laying the foundation for everything else she goes on to explore in this entertaining and elegantly written book. Her lens as an Indian Muslim woman navigating the globe brings depth and layers to her reimagining of the travel genre of writing.

Airplane Mode: A Passive-Aggressive History of Travel: By Shahnaz Habib, Context Westland, 288 pages, ₹699

Travel is, in every way, social injustice in action—whose passport is more powerful, who gets visa-free access, who requires transit visas just to travel between terminals, who chooses places of tourist interest, even who writes the guidebooks is an exercise in perpetuating discrimination against Third World countries. Habib prefers the term over other more politically correct ones, such as developing nations, emerging economies or the Global South, because it describes the reality, the chaos and the creativity of the world that we’re all from far better. And because, “if we were being honest, wouldn’t we just call it the exploited world?".

Drawing on her own experience of having to file reams of paperwork for a French visa before she got her US permanent residence permit (this was when she still held an Indian passport), Habib discusses “passportism", which discriminates based on “the colour of a person’s passport". This too has its roots in colonialism—the modern passport was introduced largely to police the movement of people from the colonies to “white countries"—and we’ve all now internalised it to discriminate against one another. In Africa, for instance, richer countries make it easier for Europeans to enter than fellow Africans, and Indian immigration authorities are often more flexible about granting visas to Americans and Europeans. And of course, passport rankings have become a means for richer nations to sell golden visas—a path to citizenship based on financial and real-estate investments—tapping into the resources of poorer nations. Immigration, then, is easier for some than for others, but at its heart is the same desire to escape the world, and passport, one was born into.

Also read: 7 essential travel tech items to pick for your next trip

Born in Kozhikode in Kerala, brought up in Ernakulum, now a US citizen, a resident of Brooklyn in New York, a practising Muslim and married to an American citizen, Habib reflects on the many contradictions of this multifaceted identity, never shying away from calling herself out. She is at once immigrant, traveller, resident and tourist. Her father, who hates travelling, preferring to read about the world rather than see it, is the main source of inspiration for this exploration of what it means to travel. When he does visit her in New York or her brother in Dubai, he chooses wandering through local markets over visiting monuments. As she realises, from conversations with her father, from aimless meanderings around her once-new neighbourhood of Brooklyn, from reading, and of course, from travelling, there are many ways to travel. Travel, we are constantly told, makes us better human beings, yet we rarely reflect on the many downsides of roaming the world, the essential inequities that enable us to do so, and what really constitutes true experience and understanding of people and societies. “We are led to believe that cosmopolitanism comes from tourism," she writes, “…but, in fact, migration and minorityhood is a more effective education in worldliness".

Then there is the “discovery" of places that to locals were always just as stunning, beautiful or calming to those who lived there. At Lounge, for instance, we often run stories on mountaineering—but long before these mountains were “discovered", “mapped", “named" and climbed, they were revered and valued by local communities. Habib proposes a new word, pseudiscovery, for the people and places that were “rendered invisible" the moment Europeans arrived. In a way, this is what modern-day tourists, travellers and travel influencers do when they commodify the beauty of a place, and this is what residents in Barcelona and Malaga in Spain, Hallstat in Austria and Kyoto in Japan are resisting. Tourism renders them invisible, pricing them out of their homes, squeezing them out of their recreational spaces and changing the characteristics that made their cities unique.

For all the serious questions it raises, Airplane Mode is not a grim, gloomy lecture about the ills of overconsumption. Habib’s voice is pitch perfect, blending anecdote, fact, history and personal stories to create a lively rethinking of how we’ve viewed the act of travel. Her sharp observations, perceptive analysis and felicity for home truths are heightened by her sense of humour and eye for the ludicrous.

Finally, a book that gives you many good reasons to stay home.

Also read: Finding traces of a globalised past in a Colombo cemetery

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Shalini Umachandran

Shalini Umachandran is Editor of Mint Lounge, Mint’s award-winning magazine for deeply reported features, opinion and articles on issues that matter. She splits her time between New Delhi and Bengaluru, and has worked as a reporter, a podcaster and an editor for publications across India. She is the author of ‘You Can Make Your Dreams Work’, a book of 15 stories of people who switched careers to do what they love. She is an IWMF reporting fellow for Honduras, and a fellow of the Institute of Palliative Care India and St Christopher’s Hospice London.